I would also caution against using the Silures as a proxy for all of Wales. They were a tribe of southeastern Wales. There were other tribes in various places in Wales, like the Ordovices, the Deceangli, and the Cornovii, to name but three. Only the Silures were described by Tacitus as being swarthy. Most of the Welsh are very fair and typically British looking. Red hair is relatively common in Wales.

Completely wrong . . .

No, you are completely wrong. The Silures were in fact a tribe of southeastern Wales, and, as I reported on another thread, an actual genetic study found that Wales has one of the highest frequencies of the genetic signature for red hair of any place in the British Isles.

Actually read what I wrote: "Red hair is relatively common in Wales."

Also notice that I was writing about the ancient Silures and not about Coon and Beddoe, etc. What I wrote was absolutely correct.

Sorry, my previous post should have been clearer. I wasn't disagreeing with what you said about the Silures, rather your comment "Most of the Welsh are very fair."

This simply is not true.

Many people, including physical anthropologists, have observed that the Welsh are generally darker, in hair and eye, than people elsewhere in Britain.

John Beddoe in the 1860/70s observed that in Central Wales "there was a prevelance of dark eyes beyond which I have met with in any part of Britain," and that the people of Snowdonia were a dark race.

Beddoe's general conclusion was that the people of England were fairer than the Celtic West and he attributed this to Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings, in the east of Britain.

Fleure, James and Davies conducted a more thorough survey of Welsh Wales in the 1910s and 1930s and reached simliar conclusions - that the Welsh were a predominantly dark haired people, often with brown eyes. A lot of this data was used by Carleton Coon in his book Races of Europe 1939.

As for red hair, the allele gene for red hair does not necessarily = actual red hair.Fleure 1958 who observed real people with red hair found an avg of 6.2% for the whole of Welsh Wales and with Beddoe it was about 5%, which is not high.

For some reason red hair is more common in South East Wales, where there a few localities with red hair at 7-10% but these figures are not seen elsewhere in Wales. In North Wales, Fleure found red hair at about 3-5%.

I do not wish to belabour these points, I just get irritated with misconceptions about the Welsh.

Isn't there a hot spot in North Wales for a sub clade of Haplogroup E?

The theory about Haplogroup E being Roman soldiers is probably nonsense.

Could you expand on that please Avalon ?

Read my earlier post.

Abergele, where the high Haplogroup E was found, is a town along the North Wales coast that has been a popular destination for many years for the working classes of Liverpool and Birmingham, some of whom have settled or retired to this area.

Therefore, the high E frequency may have arrived from England in modern times. If it can be shown that the Haplogroup E people had Welsh surnames and deep y-dna ancestry in Wales, then I could accept the Roman soldiers theory.

Isn't there a hot spot in North Wales for a sub clade of Haplogroup E?

The theory about Haplogroup E being Roman soldiers is probably nonsense.

Could you expand on that please Avalon ?

Read my earlier post.

Abergele, where the high Haplogroup E was found, is a town along the North Wales coast that has been a popular destination for many years for the working classes of Liverpool and Birmingham, some of whom have settled or retired to this area.

Therefore, the high E frequency may have arrived from England in modern times. If it can be shown that the Haplogroup E people had Welsh surnames and deep y-dna ancestry in Wales, then I could accept the Roman soldiers theory.

There is a clearly a problem with Abergele but that is why I ignored it . The Roman soldiers association with E has been mentioned in the past e.g. Stephen Bird , I thought you may have had some additional info .

Not particularly relevant, but the rulers of the Kingdom of Strathclyde were 'ejected' from southern Scotland & reputedly relocated in N. Wales. On another irrelevant matter, any views on the location of the Battle of Degsastan welcomed! I have a feeling it may be Dawston, Liddesdale, Roxburghshire, or possibly Nine Stane Rig, nearby. I often wonder if Nine Stane Rig was once ten stones in number. 'Deg' in Degsastan = 10 in Welsh (or so I believe!)This is a topic that can get folk lathered up!Bob

The "E" in Abergele, Wales, is, as I recall, E-V13. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I also recall reading that there was a Roman settlement and trading outpost there or in that vicinity. Since E-V13 is most common in the Balkans, it seems to me the Roman explanation is a good one, but perhaps not the only one. Maybe the E-V13 in Wales comes from Neolithic settlers.

Isn't there a hot spot in North Wales for a sub clade of Haplogroup E?

The theory about Haplogroup E being Roman soldiers is probably nonsense.

Could you expand on that please Avalon ?

Read my earlier post.

Abergele, where the high Haplogroup E was found, is a town along the North Wales coast that has been a popular destination for many years for the working classes of Liverpool and Birmingham, some of whom have settled or retired to this area.

Therefore, the high E frequency may have arrived from England in modern times. If it can be shown that the Haplogroup E people had Welsh surnames and deep y-dna ancestry in Wales, then I could accept the Roman soldiers theory.

There is a clearly a problem with Abergele but that is why I ignored it . The Roman soldiers association with E has been mentioned in the past e.g. Stephen Bird , I thought you may have had some additional info .

The Studies found almost 39% of the people from Abergele were E3b, I don't think Liverpool would have any where near this much E3b even with it's high Irish population.

The studies required the paternal grandfather was born in the area. In the 1901 census the majority of residence in Abergele were in fact born there and had Welsh names, after that most came from the country followed by other Welsh counties.

I'm sure there is more than one explanation of how this area ended up with such an apparently high level of this haplogroup but I don't think English incursion is one of them.

Could admixture from the Muslim conquest of Spain have contributed to some of Iberia's dark hair and skin over the 800 year period? (Obviously not all from this group) I am guessing the Muslims were mostly dark hair/skin.

"After a short foray in July of 710 AD, Muslim forces from North Africa invaded the Christian Iberian Peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal) in the spring of 711, and within two years, with the exception of the extreme northwestern portion of the peninsula, had successfully overpowered and conquered the Visigothic Christian realms of Iberia.[1] Not only did it take the Frankish forces under Charles Martel to stop the Muslim horde at the battle of Poitiers in 732 from further intrusions into Western Europe, it would take nearly eight centuries for the Iberian Christians to re-take the peninsula from the Muslims."http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/medieval/articles/muslimhorde.aspx

I would also caution against using the Silures as a proxy for all of Wales. They were a tribe of southeastern Wales. There were other tribes in various places in Wales, like the Ordovices, the Deceangli, and the Cornovii, to name but three. Only the Silures were described by Tacitus as being swarthy. Most of the Welsh are very fair and typically British looking. Red hair is relatively common in Wales.

Completely wrong . . .

No, you are completely wrong. The Silures were in fact a tribe of southeastern Wales, and, as I reported on another thread, an actual genetic study found that Wales has one of the highest frequencies of the genetic signature for red hair of any place in the British Isles.

Actually read what I wrote: "Red hair is relatively common in Wales."

Also notice that I was writing about the ancient Silures and not about Coon and Beddoe, etc. What I wrote was absolutely correct.

. . .

Fleure, James and Davies conducted a more thorough survey of Welsh Wales in the 1910s and 1930s and reached simliar conclusions - that the Welsh were a predominantly dark haired people, often with brown eyes. A lot of this data was used by Carleton Coon in his book Races of Europe 1939 . . .

I do not wish to belabour these points, I just get irritated with misconceptions about the Welsh.

I do, too, and honestly, some of your posts are irritating.

"Predominantly dark haired" is not the same thing as "not fair" or "swarthy". When I wrote that the Welsh are mostly very fair and British looking, that was not "simply not true". It is true. The Welsh are not a dark-skinned, swarthy people.

I dare say that most of the people of the British Isles, including the English, are dark haired. My observation of northern Europeans in general, including the Germans and Dutch, is that they are dark haired. From what I have seen, there is even a great deal of dark hair among the Scandinavians, who are arguably the blondest people on earth.

I recall from some of your earlier posts that you cited Beddoe to the effect that Wales had a higher percentage of brown eyed people than did England. Still, in Wales, brown was not the predominant eye color. As I recall it accounted for roughly one third of the population. Having a slightly higher frequency of brown eyes than England does not make Wales the swarthy anomaly of British isles nations.

I am puzzled by a certain trend I think I detect in your posts about the British Isles and its people. I see you trying to characterize the Welsh as exceptionally dark, and your tone in that regard strikes me as negative and condescending. Your posts seem to take the same sort of tack toward the rest of the Celtic Fringe countries, but it is most pronounced with regard to the Welsh. On the other hand, you like to emphasize the blond and rufous qualities of the English, which you attribute to Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but I detect a kind of anti-Celtic animus in the general tone of your posts that disturbs me. If I am wrong, instead of getting angry at me for thinking that, perhaps you should try not to create that impression.

The amazement over dark haired, dark eyed people in the Isles keeps cropping up, as I'm sure it has for centuries. As a guy who comes from an Irish family filled with dark haired, dark eyed people I find it amusing. I have black haired, black eyed Irish cousins in Wexford and black haired, black eyed cousins in Derry. My father was black haired, black eyed and my sister and I are dark haired, dark eyed (mine are a bit hazel). It happens, and I don't think there is any deep genetic riddle to be solved.

In High School, I sat in rooms with dark haired, dark eyed Irish and fair haired, blue eyed Italians. Growing up I was often told that my "dark" coloring MUST have come from my French-Canadian 25% side, when, in fact, I know of no French-Canadian relation with anything but blue eyes.

We are not freaks! :) Nor, are we descendants of some unexplainable strain of Iberians or Italians. We are the luck of the draw in genetics, and we appear all over Ireland, all over Britain to varrying degrees.

The point is not that dark haired, dark eyed people don't exist among the Welsh, the Irish, the English, etc. When you talk about whole peoples, you are forced to generalize, and the general run of people in the British Isles, including Wales and Ireland, are not what one would characterize as "swarthy".

I personally would not call someone "swarthy" merely because he has dark hair and brown eyes. My dad had dark hair (it's white now) and has brown eyes, but he is fair skinned and sunburns very easily.

I have (or had) dark hair and blue eyes. I have a ruddy complexion (red) and sunburn very easily.

Why is that when people discuss dark featues that Spanish ancestry is nearly always brought up as if they are the only population with dark features?Also as Romans were mentioned earlier; isn't it a case that the Roman army wasn't made up of people from the heart of the empire but form comquered lands?

I think there are many Scottish & Irish families who have the old 'Shipwrecked Spaniard' or 'Gypsy' tale, used to account for dark hair. My own surname had a legend that the (generally) fair-haired Armstrongs had a chap who wed a 'Gypsy fey'. That branch from then on were known as 'black' - eg 'Black Jok' etc. I believe the gypsy tale may have had some truth as there was a gypsy king in southern Scotland named Johnnie Faa (Fey?). He was on the go around James IV's time. All that said, I'd guess descendants of dark-haired/light-haired unions would probably have their strong colouring dissipated after a few generations of marrying fairer-haired folk!Bob

Isn't there a hot spot in North Wales for a sub clade of Haplogroup E?

The theory about Haplogroup E being Roman soldiers is probably nonsense.

Could you expand on that please Avalon ?

Read my earlier post.

Abergele, where the high Haplogroup E was found, is a town along the North Wales coast that has been a popular destination for many years for the working classes of Liverpool and Birmingham, some of whom have settled or retired to this area.

Therefore, the high E frequency may have arrived from England in modern times. If it can be shown that the Haplogroup E people had Welsh surnames and deep y-dna ancestry in Wales, then I could accept the Roman soldiers theory.

There is a clearly a problem with Abergele but that is why I ignored it . The Roman soldiers association with E has been mentioned in the past e.g. Stephen Bird , I thought you may have had some additional info .

I think people jumped on the Roman soldiers theory for Abergele for the simple reason that there was a Roman Fortlet in the area, but nobody considered, or perhaps even knew about the modern. 20th century history of the north Wales coastal towns such as Abergele, Rhyl, Prestatyn, etc.

There were Roman Forts in North Wales but I don't think there is much evidence of actual Roman settlement in North Wales.

Also, as I recall the POBI project, which is autosomalDNA, said that Wales clustered closely with Ireland and Northwest France, certainly not Germans and Dutch.

I'm not sure how reliable that is, but from open source projects in the community the 'community' Dutch sample is very close to Britain and Ireland. I have considered the fact there is Huguenot ancestry in the Dutch sample which is why they tend to pull to the south. Germany is a touchy one since it is a vast territory and obviously the west and south-west Germans are very similar to the western European, and south western countries, where as further east in Germany score higher in east European scores.

I would also caution against using the Silures as a proxy for all of Wales. They were a tribe of southeastern Wales. There were other tribes in various places in Wales, like the Ordovices, the Deceangli, and the Cornovii, to name but three. Only the Silures were described by Tacitus as being swarthy. Most of the Welsh are very fair and typically British looking. Red hair is relatively common in Wales.

No, you are completely wrong. The Silures were in fact a tribe of southeastern Wales, and, as I reported on another thread, an actual genetic study found that Wales has one of the highest frequencies of the genetic signature for red hair of any place in the British Isles.

Actually read what I wrote: "Red hair is relatively common in Wales."

Also notice that I was writing about the ancient Silures and not about Coon and Beddoe, etc. What I wrote was absolutely correct.

. . .

Fleure, James and Davies conducted a more thorough survey of Welsh Wales in the 1910s and 1930s and reached simliar conclusions - that the Welsh were a predominantly dark haired people, often with brown eyes. A lot of this data was used by Carleton Coon in his book Races of Europe 1939 . . .

I do not wish to belabour these points, I just get irritated with misconceptions about the Welsh.

I do, too, and honestly, some of your posts are irritating.

"Predominantly dark haired" is not the same thing as "not fair" or "swarthy". When I wrote that the Welsh are mostly very fair and British looking, that was not "simply not true". It is true. The Welsh are not a dark-skinned, swarthy people.

I dare say that most of the people of the British Isles, including the English, are dark haired. My observation of northern Europeans in general, including the Germans and Dutch, is that they are dark haired. From what I have seen, there is even a great deal of dark hair among the Scandinavians, who are arguably the blondest people on earth.

I recall from some of your earlier posts that you cited Beddoe to the effect that Wales had a higher percentage of brown eyed people than did England. Still, in Wales, brown was not the predominant eye color. As I recall it accounted for roughly one third of the population. Having a slightly higher frequency of brown eyes than England does not make Wales the swarthy anomaly of British isles nations.

I am puzzled by a certain trend I think I detect in your posts about the British Isles and its people. I see you trying to characterize the Welsh as exceptionally dark, and your tone in that regard strikes me as negative and condescending. Your posts seem to take the same sort of tack toward the rest of the Celtic Fringe countries, but it is most pronounced with regard to the Welsh. On the other hand, you like to emphasize the blond and rufous qualities of the English, which you attribute to Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but I detect a kind of anti-Celtic animus in the general tone of your posts that disturbs me. If I am wrong, instead of getting angry at me for thinking that, perhaps you should try not to create that impression.

I think though the isles are dominated by people who as adults have a combination of some shade of mid to dark brown hair, light to middling eyes and normally fair pink toned skin. That is dominant everywhere regardless of whether it be the Celtic fringe or England. A lot of modern British politicians are good examples (well when they were young) be it Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, David Cameron. This (and a red haired variant) seems to be the basal pan-isles type although it becomes really dominant in places like Ireland. The isles people just do not fit ineatly nto the Nordic/Alpine/Med. type division as they used to be described. They have their own unique combination of dominant colouring combination (well not unique but unique in terms of domination of one type). They probably had blond hair as small kids, mousey to mid brown through childhood and mid-dark brown as adults. That is extremely common. Other than the minority who are black haired as adults (who tend to be dark haired as babies, most people start of as as infants and early childhood and eventually go through shades of brown until they are mid-dark brown haired as adults. Hardly what I would call swarthy though.

I have noticed though that when a person does have slighyly olive skin they also tend to be dark eyed and true black haired. I know they are probably separate genes but they do seem to go together in this minority and I find it hard to believe that there is not some genetic factor that make these occur together. Certainly olive skin and dark eyes go together like they are linked in some way.

The Studies found almost 39% of the people from Abergele were E3b, I don't think Liverpool would have any where near this much E3b even with it's high Irish population.

How can you possibly say that about Liverpool given that it has never been sampled for y-dna?

Quote

The studies required the paternal grandfather was born in the area. In the 1901 census the majority of residence in Abergele were in fact born there and had Welsh names, after that most came from the country followed by other Welsh counties.

I take your point but we don't know the age of the 18 sampled in Abergele that were Haplogroup E. If they were young men then their paternal grandfathers could have been born in the 1930s or 1940s. Also, knowing their surnames would be useful as the North Wales coast has been popular since Victorian times.

I'll take your word for it with regard to the 1901 census.

I know for a fact that Abergele was a popular seaside resort in the 1950s and 1960s, full of tourist caravan parks so you cannot completely a modern incursion from England, particularly Liverpool.

Isn't there a hot spot in North Wales for a sub clade of Haplogroup E?

The theory about Haplogroup E being Roman soldiers is probably nonsense.

Could you expand on that please Avalon ?

Read my earlier post.

Abergele, where the high Haplogroup E was found, is a town along the North Wales coast that has been a popular destination for many years for the working classes of Liverpool and Birmingham, some of whom have settled or retired to this area.

Therefore, the high E frequency may have arrived from England in modern times. If it can be shown that the Haplogroup E people had Welsh surnames and deep y-dna ancestry in Wales, then I could accept the Roman soldiers theory.

It's all nonsense. Haplogroup E in question is E-V13 which is somewhat common in southern Europe and the Balkans. At this point it may be that these early Levantines were darker complexioned.We know this haplogroup was present in the west of Europe in the neolithic, and was likely part of the mix who became "Welsh". There is no need for a fantastical story, especially when E-V13 was found in neolithic Northern Spain 5000 BC, and we are proposing immigration from Iberia to Wales. Moreover, E-V13 is found everywhere in Europe, including England, Ireland, Norway, Sweden...etc but at low levels.

Why is that when people discuss dark featues that Spanish ancestry is nearly always brought up as if they are the only population with dark features?Also as Romans were mentioned earlier; isn't it a case that the Roman army wasn't made up of people from the heart of the empire but form comquered lands?

I know its idiotic. France has a dominance of Brown hair too and that is also true of about half of the Germans and almost all of Western Europe. I personally think the difference is that in the isles dark hair often goes with light skin and eyes and you dont get anywhere near as many people with all-dark combinations of hair, eyes and singificantly swarthy skin as you would see on the continent. People with those combinations of all dark colouring stand out a bit in the isles and people often think they have foreign ancestry as a result. See the recent Irish film' The Guard' for an example of someone being accused of having Italian ancestry when he doesnt. That is the modern equivelent of the Armada stories! People who are furthest from the average, at one extreme of dark or lightness or the other, will always get thought of as having something exotic like Med. blood or Viking ancestors because neither is the norm. I heard the mayor of London Boris Johnston being described as 'too for the SS' by a comedian recently.

Who are you referring to in the The Guard, the English (I think he is) actor Mark Strong?Of course Spanish Sailor sounds more exotic than Georgie Burgess.

No not him. It was one of the Irish cops who the other cops were winding up about having some Italian blood. Mark Strong has an interesting look. A bit unusual. As for the lead, Brendan Gleeson, he could only be Irish. He is actually close to the stereotype of a rural irishman. That is not to say his look is terribly common, just that it is one Irish type and the type that has been used as the stereotype in America.

Wasn't there some Italian migration to Dublin some time in the last couple centuries? I think I heard about it on some Dublin radio show, from what I rememberd it was form Central Italy. Nothing massive but just a bit out of the ordinary for the time.

Wasn't there some Italian migration to Dublin some time in the last couple centuries? I think I heard about it on some Dublin radio show, from what I rememberd it was form Central Italy. Nothing massive but just a bit out of the ordinary for the time.

Oh yes. Most of the best chip shops and ice cream shops in Ireland are run by Italian families. Same in Scotland and I imagine elsewhere in Britian too. John Lynch who was in (Cal, In the name of the father, some mothers son etc) and his sister Susan Lynch (also an actress) have an Italian mother and the Irish comedian Frank Carson was half Italian too. There are several more but my minds gone blank.

The earlier mention of stereotypes reminds me of the classic 1960's-70's BBC TV series 'The Likely Lads'. In one episode, the even-handed Bob gets bigoted Terry to give one-line summaries of the various European nationalities. In this PC age, I don't suppose I can list them here, but his descriptions may well have reflected what many thought. I suppose the point is that if people are brought up being given stereotypes, then maybe they lock in - even if not necessarily accurate.Re hair colouring etc: I remember standing at the back of terraces at football & rugby matches in England in the late 60s & early 70s when longer hair was the norm. Looking down from above, I remember we remarked how all you could see was a mass of hair in varying shades of brown, with the odd being very noticeable.Not the sort of research a university professor would be interested in!!!Bob